from Hacker News

The Reliability of Go

by exch on 5/14/13, 11:11 AM with 139 comments

  • by kenkam on 5/14/13, 12:23 PM

    I would like to hear more about the technical implementations from the author on how he managed to improve performance. He mentions: "Due to the complex nature of the system this script could take up to three minutes to scan nodes and process the results" but how does Go solve this complex system that Python couldn't? 3 minutes to 1 second is a superb improvement.

    The second paragraph reads like: replacing a relational DB with a (in memory?) key value store resulted in more throughput. He implemented it in Go, but he could have implemented it in any other language.

    What I want to know is how he convinced management to use Go? Where did he find the programmers? I work in a similar environment and I don't see my firm adopting Go any time soon, although I wished they had as I'm a big fan of Go and believe it has a place especially server side processes (e.g. algo trading, market data feeds) where concurrent connections are prevalent.

  • by waterside81 on 5/14/13, 2:52 PM

    We moved a huge chunk of our code from Python to Go. We have one simple Go binary that just listens on a certain port and API requests from our Django app are proxied to the Go instance running. No issues, no panics, no memory leaks. It's pretty amazing to see a long running process never growing in memory (well, if you're coming from the Python world at least, I'm sure the JVM is pretty solid at keeping it's place nice & tidy).

    Folks - Go ain't a fad, it's a great language if your problem domain benefits from concurrency AND if you need to deploy to multiple locations and love being able to just drop a single binary and walk away.

  • by 16s on 5/14/13, 1:55 PM

    I'm sorry, but the world does not need another company-controlled, corporate programming language. .Net (Microsoft), Java (Oracle) and now Go (google).

    All of these compilers or JIT interpreters are implemented in C or C++ (which are open languages with ISO standards).

    It bothers me to no end to see corporations taking control of the fundamental building blocks (programming languages) of technology and then to see technologists and developers go on and on about how wonderful and better these corporate languages are.

    With C and C++ and Python and Ruby and Perl we have freedom. With Go, .Net and Java, etc. we do not.

    Google already control your search, your browser, your phone, your email and in some cases your OS (Chrome) why would you want them to control you programming language as well? The idea boggles my mind.

    I wish others felt as strongly about this as I do. If you want to control your future, then use C or C++ or some other ISO standardized language with lot's of free compilers available, do not use a corporate controlled programming language.

    There is a reason go compilers are C and C++.

  • by raverbashing on 5/14/13, 12:51 PM

    I remember some time ago a complaint about Go having some bugs on 32-bit machines (something related to the GC)

    So yes, if you have control over your environment it may be a better choice

    But the biggest issue with 'less than mainstream' languages are libraries. Things like DB connectors, protocol libraries (SOAP for example - yes, unfortunately this is necessary for some 3rd part services), etc

    Heck, even for Python 2 (not to mention P3) this is an issue sometimes

  • by tezza on 5/14/13, 12:56 PM

    If I had been at that conference, I would have asked the same question.

    Thanks for the data point (Yes, fine for production AFAYCT).

    What does Go do when it segfaults ? Simply saying it has not-yet-segfaulted is but one factor of production-readiness.

    Does Go leave just a coredump ?

    One thing I like about java in a production sense is that if the JVM exits unexpectedly it writes an hs_err_pid file that has a dump of what the threads are doing at the point of failure.

  • by reinhardt on 5/14/13, 1:24 PM

    Somewhat off-topic but are there any data on the penetration of Go outside Google, a few other companies [1] and weekend hack projects on Github? Thanks to its unfortunate name, even searching for Go developer positions is challenging [2].

    [1] http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

    [2] http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=go+developer

  • by sergiotapia on 5/14/13, 12:36 PM

    "Excellent tooling"; from the article.

    What does he mean? I've searched the Go websites but it seems all Google gives you is the Go compiler and a tour.

  • by koraytaylan on 5/15/13, 7:21 AM

    first I saw go I thought meh but with so many people saying good things about it makes go inevitably more interesting day after day. however I just feel like it's going to be like mongo. when it first got popular, people all moved to mongo as it miraculously solving all the problems. same thing happening with go now and after sudden disappear of all the mongo evangelists, this makes me doubtful about go obviously.

  • by moshberm on 5/14/13, 6:28 PM

    What happens if Google decides to send Go the way of the RSS reader, the SMS search, and the dinosaur?